That first year, every save chance for Edwin Díaz was like a box of flowers delivered to the Mets’ front door. The Mets would undo the ribbon and lean in for the sweet smell, and the box would blow up in their face.
This happened over and over, like a cheap gag on repeat. Everyone knew the box would explode, it seemed, except the fools in the front office.
“The deal, I knew, was going to be loud,” Brodie Van Wagenen, the former Mets general manager, said by phone recently — but he did not know that the noise would be home run balls torpedoing the 2019 season.